08/04/2009

tonight I was lucky enough to be invited to a round table meeting with the cream of the young adelaide arts, music, design and advertising scene and the adelaide city council.

organised by merge and the ACC, the meeting was put together to sound out ideas to make the city more attractive for youth and transform the sterile streets into vibrant little hubs of stuff to see and do.

here are a couple of the ideas that came out of the meeting (in no particular order):

band / gig posters - the city needs more public spaces designated for sticking up posters, so people can pop by and find out what's on that night in the city.

water frontage bars / cafes - we've got the awesome grassed areas next to the festival centre with lovely water frontage that's an ideal place to hang out on a long summer night, but we need some bars / cafes / street food there to attract people so they don't have to venture to the west end for a drink.

reduce inner city housing costs - there needs to be something done to create affordable inner city housing for young people. at the moment there's just opposite ends of the spectrum from student 1 room accommodation to $700 / week penthouse living. more young people living in the city = more young people out and contributing.

increase noise in the city - in the last decade pubs and live music venues have been getting screwed by suffocating noise restrictions forced upon them by touchy old residents in new apartments. the city is meant to be noisy and bustling, so stop listening to the whinging few and bring the noise back to the CBD.

street art zones - there needs to be a few council-blind-eye areas, where street art can go up and not be buffed.

first friday gallery night - the first friday of the month becomes a night when all galleries in the west end are open with new artwork, attracting people to west end and building a real sense of community amongst the art scene.

short term empty shop front leases - the council needs to act as a broker for short term shop front leases, so that empty shop fronts can be transformed into month long exhibitions without the usual pain of going through landlords and huge short term lease fees.

rolling leases - continuing on from the short term leases are rolling leases, so empty shop fronts get leased as exhibition spaces rolling month to month until the landlord has a full-time tenant. this provides great opportunities for emerging artists with little track record to exhibit and a steady stream of income for landlords that would otherwise have no income from those shop fronts.

close hindley street - the council experimented with closing hindley street for one saturday night. unfortunately the only attraction was a hotdog and a clown. proposal is to regularly close hindley street once a month on a saturday night to traffic and have food and drink stalls from the clubs and shops on the street and some live bands playing. that would attract people, and make the street less scary / seedy.

improve public transport - free public transport within the CBD, and extended running hours so that people can stay out in the city longer and still get around and home.

simple bus route naming system - to make it easier for international students, visitors and the general public, there needs to be a simple naming system to replace the bus numbers in adelaide. colour coded routes and simple names of the directions busses are headed would be much more user friendly.

dedicated street art laneway - it would be great for the council to dedicate one laneway in the CBD to foster street art. a safe place where anyone can paint anytime. a place where we can run masterclasses by the legends of adelaide street art. ideally the laneway would have a secure stereo system that artists / bands / djs can plug into and have live performances there. we'd install picture frame rails so that there could be outdoor exhibitions there.

de-regulate the rundle st markets - the gilles street markets are a huge success because they're run by the people. move the rundle st markets to east terrace and put them back into the hands of the people, sell organic farmers market style food and have some live bands and art to attract people.

take more risks with modern architecture - we're sick of the glass stumps going up around the city. hand some architectural design work to graduate students and talented conceptual architects so that there are more interesting buildings.

support industrial design - after graduating, industrial design students have few job opportunities in adelaide. to keep the talent in adelaide, fund more gallery spaces devoted to industrial design to show off furniture and product designers.

more public art - hire local designers to create more public art, especially more interactive public art. art that can be modified by either digital manipulation via SMS or the internet, or even by physical touch.

those were the major points raised that I remember. hopefully in the coming days / weeks there'll be an official round up of ideas from the ACC minutes. I'll add a link to that when I get one.

there was a positive feeling from the council when Matt and I raised our proposal for a street art laneway. I think the ACC might finally be coming around and realising that now they've buffed all the art from the streets they actually miss it! fingers crossed.

do you like any of the ideas generated? do you have any of your own that you think would work? then please leave a comment and I'll pass them onto the ACC.

probably the most exciting of these are the nerdy ones, teaching myself a programming language & working on a logic brain. why? because I've always neglected code, and often just learned as much as i needed to know to get by rather than sit down and learn it from the bottom up.

the logic brain project is kind of a next logical step (cough). perhaps one that i'm jumping into waaay over my head, but when i've got a super computer in the form of kuba to bounce ideas off and leech brain fodder its just too exciting to say no to.

what will the logic brain do? well we're hoping to plug a lot of relevant data into it and get it to spit out logical answers to all sorts of sustainability questions. kind of like an unbiased completely logical response to help remove all the emotional baggage that sustainability debates are usually laced with.

then when i'm getting all hot under the collar ranting and raving fuck nuclear, fuck coal, fuck everything, we're all fucked.. i'll have the logic data to calm me back down and realise that, well, yes, we are fucked, but if you do this and this, and change that, then we won't be fucked.

exciting!

well, enough ranting.. time to head off to a little street art meeting.

05/15/2009

i'm proud to say i've been sticking to my life simplification strategy well, still vegetarian, still skateboarding to work and to get around, still sharing showers and limiting my powered light / heat & cooling use, and i'm generally much happier and more relaxed.

i've also started the next segment of my life.

why the next segment?

well as of a week ago, i've been working at New Internationalist for 10 years, which means i'm entitled to long service leave.

being the amazingly adaptable organisation that they are, they let me take the 2.5 months leave over 6 months as 2 days a week off.

so i've just started the adventure of working 3 days and having 4 days to figure out what comes next.

i figure i've got 6 months to work it all out, but right now i've got a handful of choices:

* start my own business

* go into a partnership with a friend who's ready to launch a web based business

* volunteer work on local arts and environmental based projects

* relax and enjoy my hard earned time off!

at the moment i'm thinking of putting all my energy into the partnership with my friend's web based business.

i've watched it grow from a very nice technical piece of work, to something getting more and more user friendly, an now its at the point where its sexy and mature and i really want to be a part of it.

plus the beauty of it is that he believes in me as much as i believe in his project, so he's offered me a 50% share in the business. exciting stuff.

so there's every chance that the next 6 months will be the most challenging and inspiring time i've had in a while.

11/23/2008

Before I start, I want to say a massive thanks to Steve Hopkins from World Vision for putting together an awesome prize. I can't say enough about it, hit me up for free promo work whenever you like mate!

Here's the thing. I started writing about my little experience, and it got a little bit out of hand. What can I say, I like to rant.

So I've decided to condense a short version for you in true twitter style, and after reading that, if you still feel like reading on.. well then, I warned you.

The short version_

After a night out with awesome friends, I was greeted by Sydney rain. Boo.

Rain turned to smiles as Loreen and I met up with Steve & Ross. Awesome guys. Both of them.

Next, Amnesia. Cool new boutique design agency, nice 3 level studio, friendly cool people and clearly quite talented. Shame they seem to have a one tracked mind for big corporate jobs. Hope the World Vision gig is the first ethical job of many. Shouts to Brady, Brett & Heather. Verdict? WIN (given the benefit of the doubt on future ethical projects)

micro$oft surface was cool in that it used a different technology than iphone to generate touch interface. Shame it had lo-fi resolution, and didn't do everything it advertised to do.. Needs more apps, and higher res, plus projection capabilities and I'd think it was rad. Verdict? Fail.

Yahoo!7 - If Aidan is anything to go by, Yahoo!7 are in good hands. He's the balls. Seriously. Do you have an SEO question? This. Guy. Knows. All. And he's a nice guy who can speak non-g33k too. Could be a robot / genius. Watch his SEO presentation he gave us and learn. :) Verdict? WIN.

Here I sit, well lay actually, at Sydney airport after a pretty incredible day playing with some of the coolest tech toys on the planet. And although it was a totally overwhelmingly awesome experience, I came away from it with some interesting conclusions.. some of which are very unexpected.

My head space coming into the day was that I was going to be blown away by the amazing studio that Amnesia ran, that the micro$oft surface machine would have to be torn from my sweaty fingers and that the future of the internet was safe in the hands of both Yahoo!7 and Google. I thought I'd leave begging for more, kicking and screaming to afford a little loft apartment in inner Sydney. But its interesting what I actually took out of it.

Firstly, the most amazing part of the trip for me wasn't the tech toys, it wasn't even the beautiful office spaces.. it was the people. Loreen, Steve and Ross are three inspiring souls.

Loreen is the other prize winner from over at problogger. She's such an interesting mix of down to earth mother of three / marketing / competition brainiac / general blogging smarts / environmentalist. Watch what she gets up to when she has some spare time from looking after the kids, its sure to be an inspiring little venture.

The other two people travelling with me for the day were Steve and Ross, the dynamic duo who are saving the world from itself one simple step at a time. These two hot nerds from the school of entrepreneurs have the brains, the ideas and the capabilities to conquer whatever they dream up. Am I getting a little carried away with my praise here? Well maybe, but its deserved. Seriously. It is. If you ever get a chance to work with either of them from Steve's work with World Vision or Ross's seemingly infinite internetsmarts, do it. They're two people that make social responsibility kick arse without even trying. Something desperately needed given the current state of the world.

Okay, so now onto the hosts for the day, Brady and Brett from Amnesia & the little walking SEO wiki Aidan. (wtf shout to heather aka likeomg for her wonderful creative process chart)

Brady is the Amnesia goto guy for tech development. He breaks down the fragile wall between design and development departments and is generally an awesome guy. He also happened to be the guy leading development (cough) playtime (cough) on micro$oft surface. He showed us the ins and outs of this touch sensitive table top of loveliness.. from a cute little business card app they built to 4 player pong.. and even photos of running street fighter on micro$oft's surface!!! rooooockkkkk! Plus he let us spoof it interacting with an iphone, dragging photos from it, and well.. he even let me lick it! mmmmm.. tasty.

Brett is the associate producer at Amnesia, a marketing guy and public relations guy.. with a background in journalism.. so really he's pretty much the everything guy there. Which I think is the general philosophy at Amnesia, they all wear one main hat, but under that hat they have an encyclopaedia of head wear, both work and play. We didn't spend a lot of time with Brett, he was pretty run off his feet the whole time we were there, but he was kind enough to buy a few rounds of Mule's.. a new project they're working on at Amnesia. A mule being a combination of Vodka, Ginger beer and Lime, which is a surprisingly tasty combination.

Aidan Beanland, the SEO guy at Yahoo!7, was our last stop for the day. And to be honest, this was the part of the day I got the most out of. Aidan is a warm, friendly, super organised and switched on guy. His presentation on SEO was written in such an easy way to understand, that he present us lots of in depth techniques to apply to our websites and blogs. I was even lucky enough to have him run through my work website www.newint.com.au/shop and get his feedback. Luckily I haven't done too much wrong, just a few little tweaks of page titles and use of internal links to fix things up. I wrote a bunch of notes from the session, but Aidan also gave me permission to link to his actual SEO presentation as a PDF. So read it and enjoy!

Last stop you ask? What happened to the visit to Googleplex? Well, sadly for us Google phoned and cancelled the morning of the training day. Something about an important guest from the US arriving.. sure, these things happen.. but for me Google, you fail. Especially as coming into the day, that was probably the highlight I was most looking forward to. Boo to you. You really should put me on the Android phone beta testing team for that, don't you think?

Okay, so now the tech toys review that you've all been waiting for:

micro$oft surface.

Getting to lay my hands on it prior to its public launch date was pretty awesome, but did the big overweight cousin of the ipod touch live up to its hype? Or was it merely another virtual mime artist of the micro$oft corporation, attempting to pull a digital rabbit out of its hat.. but forgetting to render the hat.. and the rabbit. (imagine if they pulled a penguin.. cough.. nerd reference)

Sadly, I have to confirm the latter. Yes, surface is a cool concept, a neat stepping stone towards touch sensitive walls and objects of the future.. and sure its packaged in a nice clean package, amazingly minimal by micro$oft's standards. But here's the reality check. Its basically just a big glorified low-res tablet with some very primitive software that you can develop apps for.

First epic fail we found was that surface DID NOT detect and transfer photos from a digital camera as their promo video showed. At present it can't even detect anything other than a tiny 8-bit code on a business card. Sure that's mostly a limitation of the apps running on it now, but come on micro$oft, if you're going to release them into the wild for the public to ooh and aah over hoping to win some fanboys and girls, at least release it capable of doing stuff that you say it can on the promo video.

Second fail was the resolution. Its a tiny 1024 x 768. Here's a corporation that screws money out of you at every opportunity and the best concept touch machine they can muster displays the same number of pixels as the monitor in an average household or less than that of 3 iphone displays!

So what is it good at?

Well, it's different to the way an iphone works. Because it isn't limited by size, it can use video cameras to scan the surface for changes in light which means it can scan things that are placed on its surface. That's its main strength (and weakness)

Why is this cool?

Because somewhere down the track you theoretically will be able to lay a page down on the surface and when you pick it up again, it'll be scanned and a copy laying on the surface to manipulate / email / copy / throw at another device.

Why isn't it cool?

For a couple of reasons. Firstly, because its sensitive to light rather than detecting touch, moving lights can control it (lasers too? not sure about this one). So Brady was telling us that this has been a bit problematic when on stage with moving lights, because they activate buttons on the surface. The paper scanning abilities are also arguably a dying art. Its like teaching a young boy to type on the typewriter, sure that's great, but why not just use a computer to avoid having to text scan his work in the future. Similar is for the surface machine, why not just wirelessly transfer the document via wifi or bluetooth. Cameras these days are coming out with wifi built in, mobile phones have it, so why not use that?

Last word on surface.

The obvious pun is that on the surface, its a cool concept, but for me I'm still more excited about the capabilities of my iphone than the future of surface.

Should micro$oft build a higher res version, less sensitive to lights and present the dev apps as open-source, then maybe I'll be wetting my pants.

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Eating and drinking and staying in sydney.

Drink. If you're looking for a nice place to drink quality wine & cocktails, check the victoria room. Beautiful old furniture and lovely lighting, plus bar tenders who really love the drinks they create.

Eat. The best food (from a vegetarian perspective) that I had on the whole trip was from iku whole foods 62 Oxford St, Darlinghurst. They offer organic, biodynamic, macrobiotic, vegan, vegetarian & gluten free food. I can highly recommend the mushroom dahl & tofu currie. Oh and don't forget a glass of spicy hot chai.

Stay. I was put up in the Travelodge Sydney, and although the rooms are pretty small, it was a clean, neat, well organised place. Good value, but the best feature is its location. 3 minutes walk from the Museum subway train station, which connects you directly to the airport in 13 minutes.. and a short walk to loads of coolpubs.

10/27/2008

so it seems that my little blog and my simple actions blogging about poverty didn't go unnoticed. that's right, the lovely people from over at World Vision's Learn about Poverty blog action day thought that my post was quite good.

good enough to be the winner of the competition!!!! which has made me pretty much the happiest man on the planet.. almost as happy as Obama will be in November.. right??!? right??!?

shameless politics aside, its time to get excited about the prize.

first will be the chance to get my mischievous little hands on the micro$oft surface machine, a pretty neat touch sensitive table thingy that no doubt the amnesia kids have hacked to do strange and amazing things. meeting the guys from amnesia / razorfish will be a privilege in itself actually.. they're the guys behind the technology that made the learn about poverty blog action day happen. so that'll be pretty neat meeting them.

then its off to speak with the yahoo!7 guys about Search Engine Optimisation or SEO for short.. which i know will be uber interesting from a nerd point of view, because i have an idea of what search engines want in my mind.. but the reality is bound to be quite different. so i'm hoping to learn some new tricks i'll share with you all.

finally, to cap off an amazing day (if my brain hasn't exploded yet) i'm going to be taken around Google's Sydney office.. the googleplex of the southern hemisphere. here my one aim will be to 'go to the bathroom' and accidentally get "lost".. never to return again. so if you don't read any more posts for a while, my mission was a success, so please don't go asking around for me.. i'll be happily segwaying my way around from concept meeting to concept meeting, trying to convince the google kids to take their wonderful software tech and implant it into environmentally giggly real life hardware like bus shelters, post boxes, lamp posts & electrical boxes, so all those grey mundane things can educate us about just how fun sustainability can be. or something.

hmmm.. may have got a little lost in the last paragraph there.. guess that's the consequence of trying to write a blog half an hour before the bust to the airport leaves while my brain is feverishly trying to come to terms with the fact it will soon be playing with much bigger and harder throbbing brains.

anyway, back to the point simon, to the point.

if you want updates on my little adventures, point your mouse to any of the following. I'll try and get as many useful updates on each when and where possible:

10/13/2008

poverty is a strange concept for a lot us growing up in Australia these days. for the majority of us, we live in relative comfort. we have access to jobs to earn money, if we can't work we have access to a (relatively) good welfare system. if we get sick, we have a (relatively) good health care system to get us better. we have access to clean water, electricity, & telephone / internet services.

so when we hear the word poverty mentioned, its pretty hard to imagine a life without all those luxuries and relate to the hardships that the majority of the world's people are going through.

even harder is trying to fathom that almost 50% of the world's population live on less than $2.50 a day.

and 80% live on less than $10 a day. 80%!!!

but the problems don't stop there, because the poorest countries of the world keep on getting poorer even with the aid they receive. how can this happen? because for every $1 of aid they receive, they have to pay back $25 for the debts their country have to rich world countries!

this amazingly powerful quote by that gandhi guy has stuck with me for years. my parents had the poster on our kitchen wall, and although i read it every day growing up, i never really knew what it meant or how to live by it. its only in the last year that i've really got it. the simpler i live and the less i consume, the more there will be to go around for those that really need it.

simplifying my life

it took a few weeks to get used to the idea of simplifying my lifestyle. for me the hardest part was breaking my routines. but once broken, the changes were simple and in some cases, actually quite enjoyable!

here are some of the little things i've changed:

* stopped driving to work, started skateboarding to work. (travel time is actually 5 mins less door to door, and less dependency on oil!)

* sold my car. (i now share one with my girlfriend for emergencies)

* turned vegetarian. (vegetarians use 10 times less energy and 100 times less water!!)

* stopped buying lunch, and started making my own organic food at work in the kitchen. (saving $8 / day, eating healthier)

* started cooking bulk dinners at home. (its not that much extra work, costs less, and saves time! i have "fast food" in my freezer any night of the week now!)

* wear more clothes in winter / bought rugs for the couch. (so i use less heating at home)

* put up partitions in my house so that if i do need to heat a room, i can heat a smaller space. (i've managed to reduce my electricity bill by 1/3!)

* have less lights on, installed power saving globes, burn more candles. (and get a lot more sexy time with my girlfriend!)

* share shorter showers with my girlfriend. (i now use less gas and water, even though i'm cooking more!)

* set a budget and put my savings away at the beginning of the month. (managing to save 30% of my income)

* set up automatic debits to donate to charity. (working towards donating 5% of my income, currently at 2.5%)

so what does all this mean?

well at the end of the month, i've now got more money left over. which means i can donate more to support the people who have less than me and are living in tough conditions around the world.

having more money left over also means i can work less. i've managed to stop working my second job, which has freed up much more time to do creative things and have more time to spend with my friends and girlfriend, go for walks, skateboard and relax.

this free time also gives me much more time to clear my mind, which has led to less stress and a generally happier lifestyle.

give it a try yourself!

i can highly recommend it.. and while you're at it, blog about it to share your experience. oh, and if you've got any suggestions or comments on my little life simplification, please ask!!!

Sixty years ago plastic was an exotic development of modern chemistry. Today it is the most widespread human-made substance in the world. More than 250 billion pounds of raw plastic pellets are produced from petroleum feedstock every year. It is everywhere, in places you never imagined: computers and cell phones; packaging; food and drink containers; home furnishings and building materials; cars, trucks, airplanes and boats; childrenâ€™s toys and beauty products.

Slum dwellers in Latin America and Africa build their shanties from plastic sheets and collect their water in plastic buckets; plastic flip-flops protect the feet of millions of peasants across Asia. Western consumers eat their take-out food with plastic cutlery from plastic foam containers while swigging water from plastic bottles.

Now no part of the planet can escape its toxic impact on human health and the environment.